A critical aspect of integrating something into the societal mainstream -- of making it widely acceptable -- is to turn it over to PhDs. Academics make their careers by laying hold of something wild and taming it, creating a new way of "discoursing" about it that few can follow. In this way, they turn wild monsters that can keep us awake at night into neutered tomes that can put us quickly to sleep.
So it is that an increasing number of university professors are staking their professional claims in the toilet. And while this is a clear sign of progress for the cause of Shameless Shitting, it is also a turn that should give us pause, a reason for PR devotees to mourn.
In yesterday's Boston Globe, columnist Alex Beam describes the work of two academic books exploring ''the premise that
public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division."
Here from the book proposal is a taste of the sort of analysis we can expect from Drs. Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner, the authors of one of these books:
''Indeed, public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces in contemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between 'gentlemen' and 'ladies' remains central to (and is further naturalized by) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design."
By the way, many social scientists talk these days about abstract ideas getting "inscribed" into physical objects (often called "artifacts"). So a guy shaping the handle of a hammer isn't just trying to make a thing you can hold; he's inscribing his idea of how the tool, er artifact, should be used and thus in the process is contraining your thoughts and actions. He's also making visible to the insightful social scientist his own view of the universe vis-à-vis that tool. Heady stuff, no?
The other academic Mr. Beam caught up with is Dr. Clara Greed, author of the book ''Public Toilets: Inclusive Urban Design." She seemed a little more down to earth in her approach, but perhaps only because Beam was quoting from their conversation:
"It's an Anglo-Saxon thing … that this research seems like a joke. But it's a very serious issue because everybody needs to go to the toilet...It's a global issue nowadays. A nation is judged by its toilets."
That sounds a little like Dave, doesn't it? And hey Dave, can you give us a representative line from your book? You're not going to turn silly on us just to sound smart, are you?
